COMPANY NEWS; Metropolitan Life Meeting Investigated

The president of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company said yesterday that he attended a meeting where the company's lawyers and its leading salesman argued over the approval process for sales letters used to solicit customers about six weeks before Florida officials said some of those letters were misleading and deceptive.

In response to the Florida allegations, Metropolitan Life began its own investigation, which led to the dismissal at the end of last year of seven employees, the highest ranking being a senior vice president. Ted Athanassiades, Metropolitan's president and the company's No. 2 executive, was not among the executives disciplined for involvement in improperly selling insurance policies across the country through the Tampa office.

Thomas Tew, a lawyer hired by the Florida Insurance Department, said the July meeting was included in his investigation of Metropolitan's sales practices. "The meeting is a strong suggestion that all the parties knew of what was going on in the Tampa office," he said. "Otherwise, why should the legal department be at odds with the marketing group, and why have a meeting with the president of the company called in as a mediator?"

The existence of the July meeting, and the attendance of Mr. Athanassiades, was disclosed yesterday by Bloomberg Business News.

Mr. Athanassiades, an actuary who worked at Metropolitan Life for 32 years and was head of its pensions group before being promoted to president last April, said the meeting did not reveal to him that the letters used by Metropolitan's Tampa office before 1993 were deceptive.

"I did not read the letters or presale literature," he said in an interview yesterday. "The subject of the meeting was the approval process," he said, not the evaluation of the wording in the letters. Different Sales Letters

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Richard Mandel, a lawyer at Metropolitan, said Rick Urso, the head of the Tampa office and Metropolitan's leading salesman, asserted at the July meeting that the sales letters approved by the legal department in New York after November 1992 were not as good in attracting customers as earlier letters he prepared, which were approved by superiors in his district.

Mr. Athanassiades acknowledged that the company knew of at least the potential for trouble from the letters that Mr. Urso used. But Mr. Athanassiades said that until he was confronted by Florida accusations, he was confident that any abuses in sales letters "would be fixed by the sales process." He mentioned the cover letter attached to every policy that explains it is life insurance and the 10 days in which new customers may review a policy and reject it.

Mr. Tew noted that interviews with customers and agents showed that the sales pitch used on potential customers who responded to the millions of letters mailed by the Tampa office failed to adequately identify the product being sold as life insurance. Florida investigators say the product was sold as an investment and retirement plan, with inadequate disclosure about the penalties that buyers would face if they stopped making premium payments.

Early this year, Metropolitan promised to make refunds to any customers who were misled in their purchase of life insurance policies. The company said the offer could result in $30 million of refunds to as many as 45,000 customers.

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A version of this article appears in print on January 14, 1994, on Page D00003 of the National edition with the headline: COMPANY NEWS; Metropolitan Life Meeting Investigated. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe